GDPR and WordPress. What should you do?

GDPR and WordPress. What should you do?

Data Breaches and storing them for unscrupulous means has become a talk of the hour these days. Therefore protecting the data of millions of internet users around the world has become a top priority for all the countries. Keeping this in mind, Government of Europe has enacted the GDPR that is General Data Protection Regulation which becomes enforceable starting from May 25, 2018. This regulation covers the European Union and Great Britain. We are going to talk about GDPR WordPress Websites Impact.
As per GDPR, their primary goal is to improve privacy and control over personal data of people. These regulations include protected data such as name, address, ID numbers, web location, IP address, cookie data etc. Non-compliance with these regulations will be subject to a fine of up to 20 million Euros.

GDPR WordPress Impact

WordPress today powers around 28% of world’s websites, it becomes important for it to comply completely with these regulations. So what is GDPR and How it will impact WordPress, let’s find it out in this article? These regulations are specifically designed to protect the data privacy laws all across the Europian countries. This regulation becomes urgent for WordPress as the GDPR team focusses on protecting data and privacy of the users.

WordPress is the core platform for thousands of developers around the world will definitely get affected by this regulation. The major ways being:

Collection and Storage of Data:

The most important way that site owners use is to collect data and personal identifying information of the users. Whether you are creating a form or registering to a site, your data is recorded by the site owners. GDPR makes is compulsory for a user’s consent before recording this data. If a user disagrees with collecting his PII then the sites cannot collect his data and store them.

Guidelines for Plugins:

It becomes important for plugin owners to create proper guidelines for plugins being GDPR ready. Similarly, business or developers using a third party plugin must make sure that these themes and plugins are GDPR compliant.

Adding Documentation:

Site owners must add proper documentation to educate their users on privacy and GDPR compliance requirements. They must make sure that their users are well aware of all their policies, terms and regulations.

GDPR WordPress Opt-in Impact

This is a very important aspect of GDPR. Sites using WordPress or WooCommerce must make sure that they provide their users an option of opt-in i.e requiring the approval of the users rather than making it automatic by default. For example, if a website wants its users to subscribe to its newsletter then the users must have an option to either opt-in or opt-out of it as per their consent rather than having the box checked by default. The EU has said that you must “get their clear consent to process the data.”

What can you do?

GDPR has strict guidelines and regulations for all the developers working on WordPress. But the upside of these regulations is having a unified privacy policy that will work for every site owner. The question arises what can you as a WordPress user do? Review your site and ensure that all the data has a consent requesting feature. Also, all the plugins must follow the GDPR guidelines and the information is stored properly and under these regulations. Also, create proper documentation regarding these regulations. In a nutshell, just make sure that your website complies with all the regulations and that you ask for your user’s consent by opt-in and not by default in order to store their data or to delete it.

So, let us know what do you think about GDPR and how will you make sure that you follow all of its guidelines.